Problems with community safety, botting, and bugs led to the decision to shut down the 17-year-old game

With increases in game breaking bugs, bots, and a shrinking community, Jagex announced today that it would at last bury the bones of RuneScape Classic. The first version of RuneScape will wind down over the coming months for an eventual shuttering on August 6.

The RuneScape Classic team cited numerous issues as the reasons for the shutdown, noting that the game had not be fully supported for years but that the steady increase in issues made it impossible to keep the service reliable.

"With advancements in technology helping to further support both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, our tools are no longer compatible with Classic," the team said. "This is particularly a problem with our community safety and macro detection tools. The game is now easily abused with the use of 3rd party macro tools, and botting has become an increasing issue."

RuneScape Classic was the original version of the game RuneScape and was maintained simultaneously with RuneScape's second version when the latter launched in 2002. Due to a preponderance of cheating, Jagex eventually limited Classic to RuneScape members who had previously played the game. Now, only a few hundred players are online at a time, spread across five servers.

Old School RuneScape, which represents the second version of RuneScape was it was in 2007, will remain online. The current version of RuneScape released in 2013 and is the third major iteration of the game.

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